Tagged: university

Writing in Canon and Culture, Prof. Colin Garbarino of Houston Baptist University poses an interesting and accurate critique of the common notion that the nation’s colleges and universities indoctrinate a generally conservative or at least politically and culturally neutral incoming student population into advanced progressive leftism and political correctness. They do impose such an agenda, he notes, but the overwhelming majority of students they are indoctrinating have already heard and adopted its fundamental premises upon arrival.

Co-author Elizabeth Clarke remembers attending a speech in Waukegan, IL with her late husband in the summer of 1967, at which Senator Everett Dirksen (Senator Dirksen represented Illinois in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1933 – 1939 and the U.S. Senate from 1951 until his death in 1969.) spoke passionately against the then-pending Supreme Court case of Keyishian et al v Board of Regents that ruled against loyalty oaths.

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Want to know why capitalism will always triumph over collectivism? It responds to people’s desires, even those who would consider themselves enemies of capitalism. A case-in-point is the ubiquitous Che Guevara t-shirt. Anyone who has spent any time walking down a city street will have come across at least one young person wearing Che’s famous likeness. Some leftists have argued that the sheer pervasiveness and popularity of the image is proof of the enduring principles of which Che has sometimes been seen as a symbol. Yet that is not the case.

College education has more and more been described by the political left as a right to which citizens ought to be entitled. This view has been popularized among left-leaning students, many of whom are energized by ruinously expensive college loans. They clamor for the “fair solution”, namely that the government should pay for all of it. The effort to make college a right is a disastrous proposition. It is a dangerous pipe-dream that could devastate an already rickety higher education sector. There are problems with the way student loans and college fees operate at present, but this is not the way to fix it.

The benefits of government-funded university research are not shared widely enough in society, with universities retaining full ownership, for the most part, of their academic work. This means they get to profit from the government-funded research, and rarely have to share it with the taxpayers. By mandating that the research it spends so much taxpayer money on enter the public sphere, the government can more effectively spread the benefits of its own largesse and do its duty to all its citizens to provide them with the full benefit of what it produces with their tax money.

Victor Davis Hanson is a well-known historian, commentator, and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is collaborating with Pajamas Media on a project called Freedom Academy- an online resource that allows the average reader to delve into a brief survey of western civilization and values.